Chef Gamling and his life partner, George, had retired to Kentucky a year before to be near George’s family. Chef, my mentor in culinary school, was the only family I’d had in a long time. Never one to tolerate martyrs or kitchen drama, Chef had assigned himself the task of “whipping me back into shape.”
Knowing Chef as I did, it was possible he would use a wire whisk.
So there I stood, on a dirt driveway in the middle of nowhere, outside the two-bedroom farmhouse I’d rented from late September to late October. It looked as if someone had been building a sturdy little farmhouse and at the last minute decided that Victorian gingerbread and frills were an absolute necessity. The house was halfway to restored, with recently painted lemon yellow siding and bleached white trim. But there were no flowers in the yard, no silly wind chimes laced through the gingerbread eaves, and I found that sort of sad. There were carefully mulched beds surrounding the house, but no one had bothered to plant anything in them. The house seemed ancient but somehow half-finished, a pall of failure hanging over it like real estate B.O.
I would fit right in.
My landlady, Lindy Clemson, had placed the house on a rental site after she and her husband filed for divorce. She’d told me she wanted to get some income out of it before she put it on the market in late October, when the divorce was finalized. Lindy seemed nice enough, if a little tightly wound. It was a real stroke of luck finding a landlord willing to rent for a term as short as one month, particularly in such a small town.
I heaved a sigh and adjusted the messenger bag on my shoulder, blowing the stick-straight dark brown hair from my face. Resolved, I tugged open the rear door of my SUV and hauled out my suitcases and boxes of kitchen equipment. The thought of using someone else’s pots, pans, and knives was just ridiculous. I’d also packed coolers with the contents of my fridge—organic eggs, cheeses from Meroni’s, asparagus from Sal (my asparagus guy), and enough wine to sink a ship. And of course, my travel-sized spice kit.
None of the food talked to me during the drive, which I took as a good sign.
Unpacking didn’t take long. I hadn’t brought many clothes, and I left my pans and knives in their special linen wrappings in the packing boxes. I explored the house, but once you got past living room, kitchen, dining-room-turned-office, two bedrooms, and bath, there wasn’t much to discover. The basement, Lindy had explained, was being used to store her ex’s belongings and wouldn’t be accessible under my rental agreement.
The rooms were clean but bare. Lindy had left only the most basic of furnishings, the kind of stuff older relatives pawn off on college students and newlyweds: an old brown plaid couch, a sprung pleather Barcalounger, a chipped pressed-wood coffee table. Not to mention the bold brass and black laminate dining-room table that may have belonged to a villain on Miami Vice.
A few pictures decorated the walls, but squares of unfaded wallpaper revealed where other frames had hung. Other rooms were freshly painted or, like the pretty little kitchen with its cheerful white and blue tile, had recently been refloored. The house smelled pleasantly of linseed oil and sawdust. I explored the rooms, pleased to find the odd window seat or corner bookshelf here and there.
While I was happy with the house, it didn’t matter much. I could live without cubbies and comforts. I just wanted to do my time “on sabbatical” and get back to the city to reclaim my life.
The main problem was, without the grinding routine of the restaurant, I had no flipping clue what to do with myself. There was TV, but it only had basic cable, and I didn’t feel like sitting down for the farm report. I hadn’t thought to bring any books with me, and the only selections to be found in the house were a bunch of John Jakes paperbacks. I wasn’t even hungry. Ever since “The Incident,” my stomach fought against anything but chamomile tea and toast. So I did something I hadn’t done in almost ten years: I treated myself to more than four hours of sleep.
I put fresh sheets on the lumpy little double bed in the master bedroom, pulled the shades tight, and went to bed at 7:30 P.M. I slept deep and dreamless, even with the occasional creak of the house settling against a backdrop of blissful country silence.
The first order of business the next morning was to drop by my landlady’s office with my deposit and rent for the month, then to visit Chef Gamling. It shocked me to find that Chef Gamling was well and truly retired. Like most of his students, I believed he would die with a spatula in one hand and an unruly saucier’s collar in the other. Now he ambled around his house all day in yoga pants while George taught chemistry at the community college. He was taking up gardening and painting abstract watercolor landscapes that looked like extremely depressing Rorschach blots.
George, a sweet man with fading cornsilk-colored hair and shoulders as broad as a barn, insisted I was too skinny from the moment I walked through the door of their cute little ranch house. Before ushering me to the back porch, George loaded me down with a bowl of something called monkey bread (a local specialty, I assumed). It was basically blobs of biscuit dough shoved into a Bundt pan and doused in caramel syrup. I don’t believe monkey was an actual ingredient. I didn’t want to ask.
I think this lump of sucrose-soaked carbs was supposed to serve as a comforting buffer for when Chef lowered the boom on me. It did not work.
“Any proper student of mine would know better,” Chef growled without preamble, glaring down from his easel, a paintbrush hanging loose in his hand. Chef was a stocky, mustachioed bull of a man with salt-and-pepper hair and deceptively steely gray eyes. And because I knew he loved me and I deserved the ass chewing, I contritely sipped iced tea, trying not to feel like an ill-behaved third-grader called to the principal’s office. The hint of a German accent made the admonishments seem even sterner than he intended.
“A chef must be sharp, reacting to a multitude of crises with calm and confidence. In order to do that, you need rest and proper meals. Did I not tell all of my students that ignoring your body’s basic needs was a one-way ticket to addiction, exhaustion, and disaster? How are you to maintain quality and prevent mistakes if you can’t remember orders? What good are you to your staff if you have run yourself down like a soggy dishrag? How are staff to respect you if you are singing and dancing like the puppet show—what’s it called, with the chicken and the vampire?”
“Sesame Street?” I suggested.
“Yes, Sesame Street.”
“I don’t think Big Bird is a chicken,” I grumbled petulantly.
“Yes, I’m so sorry. You clearly have the expertise in performing figments of one’s imagination. And sassy-mouthing your mentor.”
“You’re going to make me peel potatoes again, aren’t you?” I groaned.
Chef Gamling did not, in fact, make me peel potatoes, as he would have when I made a stupid mistake in school. He gave me several Tupperware containers full of his special maultaschen, a German dumpling dish that he only made for me when I was sick in school.
His eyes softened as I bobbled the containers. “I worry about you, süße.” My throat caught at his rare use of a German endearment. He pinched my cheek gently, as if gauging how much weight I’d lost over the last year. “I don’t hear from you in months, and you show up at my door looking like this? Pale, skinny, big dark circles under your eyes. You look like you’re going to drop at any moment. And George is no good with first aid.”
“You wouldn’t be performing mouth-to-mouth on me in the ‘dropping’ scenario?” I asked, squinting up at him.
He shook his head and hugged me fiercely. “I have heard the foul words that mouth is capable of producing. Lips that dirty shall never touch mine.”
“Hey, you were the one who told the female students that professional chefs ‘often season the food with salty language,’ so we couldn’t afford to become ladylike and offended.”
“Yes, but I didn’t expect you to embrace the concept so wholeheartedly.” He sighed.
And so I was instructed to go home, sleep, eat, and then sleep again. If I didn’t finish the maultaschen within three days, he was going to add malted milkshakes to my “regimen.” Also, I was supposed to meet him at the HMH First Baptist Church the next Saturday. The last time I’d seen the inside of a church, a funeral was involved, so this was not a good sign.
—
George caught me on my way out of the house and gave me a tire-sized chunk of monkey bread to call my very own. I couldn’t help but accept it, because the gesture was so sweet. So very, very sweet.
George was a veritable font of information about local quirks and perks. When he heard where I was staying, he’d clapped his hands together like a little kid and demanded to know all of the details. When I gave him nothing but a confused smile, he told me that “the Lassiter place” had quite a reputation. “Everybody knew” that the house was rife with ghostly lights and strange noises. Before Lindy’s husband bought the place, teenagers used to sneak out to the property and dare each other to knock on the door and call out for the original owner, John Lassiter.
“You’re saying my house is haunted?” I asked.
“More like cursed,” George told me. “Ever since poor John Lassiter built it for his wife-to-be in 1900. He was one of those confirmed bachelors who suddenly decide to get married in their fifties. His fiancée was young and fickle. Elizabeth Early didn’t really want to marry John, so she kept finding reasons that the house wasn’t ready. She wanted the kitchen to be east-facing, she wanted a water closet, she wanted gingerbread and bits of flotsam all over the eaves. Finally, her father put his foot down and told her to quit stalling and put poor John out of his misery. The morning of their wedding, they woke up to find Elizabeth had run off with a peddler.”
“Tacky.”
“But effective,” George conceded. “John never heard from her again. He died a few years later, alone in that little house. He could have sold it. There were plenty of young men who would have given him good money for a pretty house to offer their brides. But he wouldn’t budge. He didn’t want a happy couple living in his house when he was so alone. And ever since he died, any couple who has lived together in that place has either died or had a marriage so miserable they wished they were dead.”
